Popdust Wants To Be The Pitchfork Of Pop Music, Only Bigger

Popdust, the pop-music news site that debuted earlier this year, is—like a post-haircut Justin Bieber—on the verge of coming of age. Over the last 30 days, the site has garnered 350,000 unique visitors, and has formed new partnerships with AOL, MTV, CNN, Gawker, Vibe, Grammy.com, and others. A recent video of Britney Spears's dance styles over the years went extremely viral, ending up on Huffington Post, Jezebel, and even Business Insider.

The Internet is fairly glutted with pop-music sites, and sites for celebrity news, so a site like Popdust might at first glance seem superfluous. But to hear its founders tell it, there's a need for an authoritative voice where those two realms intersect—a Pitchfork for pop music, if you will. As David Wade, the entrepreneur behind the site, told TheNextWeb, even places you might traditionally trust to cover music are abdicating their responsibility. "MTV cares more about TV than M," he said.

Investors, at least, see promise here, having sunk $1 million into
the venture. The business model, for the time being, is ad-supported; it
runs ads from the MOG Music Network,
according to TNW. It has plans for a forthcoming feature, "Friends with
Benefits," which will incentivize people to engage with the site and
spread the word about it through the dangling of various
carrots—products from ad partners, for instance, and even possibly
facetime with stars.

The NYC-based Gramercy Labs
is behind Popdust; it has launched other sites like the
"invitation-only wine private sale company" Lot18 and Fameball, a site
that combines "entertainment content and social gaming." An aura of
exclusivity, celebrity, luxury, and frivolity seem to be the hallmarks
of the Gramercy Lab style. It describes Popdust this way:

"In
a sea of copycat celebrity gossip, Popdust trains an expert
music-centric lens on the artists creating and performing the biggest
songs in the country. Popdust is the first and last word on breaking
music stories; with compelling original video features and direct access
to the most interesting and influential acts in Pop, R&B, Hip-Hop
and Country."

Wade tells Fast Company that for the
foreseeable future, ad support and branded content are definitely the
way to go. Even as music magazines that may be considered competitors struggle with profitability, the web provides expanded opportunities for ad integration. Brands might soon worm their way in to those Magic Box
videos, for instance. "We could see brands doing heavy integration"
there, Wade says. Pointing to the example of Lot18, though, he adds that
"commerce is in the DNA" of Gramercy Labs. In the future, there might be
opportunities to latch on to the "short tail of pop artists." For instance, the site may sell clothes or accessories pegged to a
recent artist's appearance, Wade explains. "Those purple glasses Justin
Bieber wears? Here they are," Wade says.

The secret weapon in Popdust's arsenal is Craig Marks, the site's editor, formerly of Billboard, Spin, and Blender. It's a great match for the site, for more than one reason. Marks's view of music journalism certainly squares with Wade's: Marks is co-writing a book with Rob Tannenbaum about MTV. "We'll be retracing the network's rise from a 1981 launch to its 1992 rejection of music programming in favor of reality TV, and it'll be published in time for MTV's 30th anniversary," Tannenbaum toldThe New York Post last year. The nostalgia-laden book will be called I Want My MTV: Stories From the Golden Age of Music Videos, 1981-1992.

More importantly, Marks's status in the industry gives the site access to top celebs. Hence his site's ability to get rock stars to sit for an embarrassing, off-the-wall interview feature called the "Magic Box." Here's a particularly not-safe-for-work offering with Aubrey O'Day, in which she talks about having sex with Eminem in her dreams, having sex with her college boyfriend, and having sex at Disneyland.

Whether this is music journalism of a stronger sort than what MTV and others have to offer, users of the site will have to decide.